Margie Moffat ranks as the most generous Scot

The Sunday Times Giving List shows that Scotland's rich are front-runners in giving their wealth away

Few business empires have had more modest or improbable beginnings. In most other Scottish seaside towns of the 1950s, the small green wooden hut might well have ended up home to a rain-lashed Punch and Judy show.

In the hands of Margie Moffat, the unassuming structure in Saltcoats provided the original site for a £100m travel company that has enabled her to become Scotland's most generous philanthropist.

Following in the tradition of Andrew Carnegie, the Dunfermline-born steel tycoon who warned "the man who dies rich, dies disgraced", Moffat, the founder of the AT Mays travel chain, has given away more than half of her £105m fortune, making her the second-most generous person in Britain.

Sir Tom Hunter, the flamboyant retail entrepreneur who has pledged to give £1.05 billion fortune is third. Christopher Hohn, a City hedge-fund manager, tops the list, giving away £235.8m in humanitarian aid, more than twice his